Texas Women, With a Strong Legacy, Size Up the Democratic Field

HOUSTON — She served as first lady through her husband’s two terms, suffered the indignities of his impeachment and then made history running for his office on her own.

No, not her. It was Miriam Amanda Wallace Ferguson, known as “Ma,” the first woman elected governor of Texas, back in 1924.

So you’ll pardon the women of Texas (and Ma Ferguson was known for her generous pardons) if they don’t go all wobbly over the idea of the first female president.

Texas is no stranger to powerful women, which is why it was scarcely accidental that in Thursday night’s debate, both Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama bowed to such trailblazers as former Representative Barbara Jordan and former Gov. Ann Richards.

“While all those redneck bubba cowboys were driving the cattle, the women were running the ranches,” said Terri Burke, a longtime Abilene newspaper editor who was recently named executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas.

As Texas prepares to deliver a giant and perhaps decisive verdict on March 4 on the two closely matched Democratic presidential contenders, women — who traditionally outnumber men at the polls in this state and around the nation — may well hold the key to victory. And while many women champion Mrs. Clinton’s bid for the White House as the obvious next leap across the gender gap, others say her historic candidacy no longer carries the same urgency as it would have, say, for their mothers’ generation.

“We’re beyond feminism,” said Kathy DeLange, 64, a retired school psychologist, who wore her heart on her head — an Obama cap — as she arrived at the polls here on Tuesday for the first day of early primary voting. “We’re into personism now.”

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State Representative Ana E. Hernandez, 29, is the youngest woman in the Texas House. She cast her vote for Barack Obama.Credit
Michael Stravato for The New York Times

But not so for Jane Tillinghast, a certified public accountant who said she had just cast her ballot for “somebody seasoned and experienced” — Mrs. Clinton. “I grew up at the beginning of the women’s movement,” said Ms. Tillinghast, 61. “There’s an awful lot of prejudice against Hillary.”

Experts say the women’s vote in Texas is likely to be sliced and diced by age, race and economics, fragmenting any unity and making assumptions risky, particularly with the party crossovers of the open primaries.

With younger women gravitating to Mr. Obama, there are still many women like Melanie Carter, 31, an accountant and mother of a 12-week-old son, who said: “I definitely would like a woman as president. I don’t know when we’ll get another shot.”

But Frances T. Farenthold, 81, a prominent national Democrat who is known as Sissy and served from 1969 to 1973 as the only woman in the Texas House of Representatives, said she could not forgive Mrs. Clinton’s vote for the Iraq war and was supporting Mr. Obama.

“I’m not going to set aside everything because a woman is running,” Ms. Farenthold said, adding that the state’s tradition of strong women went only so far. “There’s a tradition of having pets, too,” she said.

As a top Texas Republican, Comptroller Susan Combs is unlikely to vote for either Democrat, but she said Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy was not the automatic draw for women it once might have been.

“Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto — for us to be looking at a woman as president, it’s a little late,” said Ms. Combs, who also served as state agriculture commissioner.

“Women have gotten comfortable in their own skin, regardless of whether they are Republicans or Democrats,” she said. “They don’t have to vote for ‘The Woman.’ ”

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Cathy Bonner, a confidante of former Gov. Ann Richards, likened Mrs. Clinton to the Texas pioneers, women of true grit.Credit
Michael Stravato for The New York Times

It was different when Ms. Richards first ran for governor in 1990, Ms. Combs said, adding, “There was a disproportionate shift of women voting for a woman.”

Since then, she said, Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Republican, became the first woman elected to the Senate from Texas and is one of the state’s top vote-getters. She is a likely candidate for governor in 2010 or possibly even for vice president this year.

Ms. Richards, who lost the governor’s mansion to George W. Bush in 1994 and died in 2006, would not have taken Mrs. Clinton’s bid so lightly, said Cathy Bonner, one of her confidantes.

“Her legacy to us is, it would matter when the first woman became president and the leader of the free world and commander in chief,” said Ms. Bonner, a marketing executive who was director of the State Commerce Department from 1991 to 1994. “It’s very important for generations to come after 220 years of never having a woman’s voice at that level.”

Ms. Bonner said Mrs. Clinton was in the mold of the Texas pioneers, “women of true grit, survivorship and independence,” who, she said, were out “pulling the wagon, just like the men.”

Gretchen Ritter, director of the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, said the state had a dual legacy. “We have long produced strong women leaders, but we’re also a Southern state, not supportive of the position of women,” Dr. Ritter said.

The civil rights and feminism movements of the 1960s and ’70s, she said, propelled a wave of memorable Texas women into public life: Ms. Jordan, the first black woman in the Texas Senate, who later became the first black woman to represent a once-Confederate state in the House of Representatives; Irma Rangel, the first Mexican-American woman in the Texas House; Eddie Bernice Johnson, the first woman to lead a major Texas House committee and now a member of Congress from Dallas; and Sarah Weddington, who argued Roe v. Wade.

And Texas would hardly have been the same without the columnist and author Molly Ivins, who died of breast cancer last year at 62 and used her last column to denounce the war in Iraq. “Raise hell,” she wrote. “Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous.”

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Comptroller Susan Combs said the candidacy of Hillary Rodham Clinton might not be an automatic draw for women.Credit
Michael Stravato for The New York Times

But few Texas matriarchs matched the antic record of the groundbreaking Ma Ferguson, who won office at 49 after her husband, James, was impeached in his second term in 1917 after feuding with the University of Texas and taking a $156,000 “loan” from the state’s beer brewers. (Wyoming had become the first state to inaugurate a woman as governor two weeks earlier.)

Mrs. Ferguson vowed to share leadership with her ousted husband, offering “two governors for the price of one,” and battled the Ku Klux Klan. But she became notorious for her prolific and possibly lucrative executive pardons that sprang about 100 convicts a month from prison.

Once in the Texas Capitol, a legendary story goes, she nearly collided with a man, who said, “Pardon me.” “Sure,” she responded. “Come on in. It’ll only take a minute or two to do the paperwork.”

She fended off an effort to impeach her as well, finished her two-year term, and ran again and won in 1932.

Texas politics has sobered up some over the years, but this year’s Democratic presidential primary contest is likely to be as hard-fought as any, with the contenders vying to exploit differences among women and Hispanics and wrest the slightest advantage from otherwise obscure hot local races.

“A lot is generational in Texas,” said Dr. Ritter, a political scientist and the author of “The Constitution as Social Design.” “Women 40 and older are more aware of gender discrimination, and maybe more distrustful of a charismatic man in the public arena. But tons of younger women are going out for Obama.”

State Representative Ana E. Hernandez, 29, Democrat of Houston and the youngest woman in the Texas House, is a case in point. She is a Mexican-born lawyer, “both female and minority,” who resisted widespread Hispanic support for Mrs. Clinton and cast her vote for Mr. Obama.

So did Kelly Greenwood, 37, a lawyer who said she changed her mind every week before deciding on Mr. Obama. “I think the world will adore him,” she said.

But Janis Hutchens, 58, a flight attendant originally from Arkansas — where, she volunteered, “I loved the Clintons” — said she cast her vote to send a woman to the White House.

A version of this article appears in print on , on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: Texas Women, With a Strong Legacy, Size Up the Democratic Field. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe